(lively classical music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud Family Trust, the Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

(lively jazz music) (patriotic fife and drum music) - [David] Hello, I'm David C. Barnett.

Welcome to Northeast Ohio's Emmy Award-winning arts and culture show "Applause."

If you've lived in Cleveland for a while, you're probably aware that the east and west sides of town are often at odds with one another.

History tells us that this rivalry dates back almost two centuries when Moses Cleveland and his Connecticut Land Company first arrived in Northeast Ohio.

- When Moses Cleveland and his group came here originally in 1796, they were only surveying east of the river.

Europeans started settling on the other side of the river, and that became Ohio City.

- [David] Ohio City was chartered in 1818, just one day before Cleveland.

Both cities saw rapid growth in population and expansion.

Goods and services flowed east and west by way of the Center Street Bridge, that was more of a pontoon light contraption than a bridge, in the area of West 25th Street.

- It may have been operated with chains that would pull the floating part of the bridge across the river and back.

We don't know exactly.

There's no real description of it that explains the mechanics of how it worked, but it was a floating bridge.

- [David] To improve trade, in 1836, the City of Cleveland began work on an alternate crossing at Columbus Avenue south of Center Street.

- [Judith] They were spending $15,000, which was a lot of money in 1835, on a new bridge, sturdy, in place, with a drawbridge in the center to let the ships come in just like we see today, solid, attached to either end, not a floating bridge, bigger, more traffic.

- [David] Ohio City feared the new bridge would cripple business.

- The people that had built the Columbus Street Bridge were planning on that area of the Flats becoming the center.

They even called it Cleveland Center.

That to them was going to be the premier shopping, living, staying place in Cleveland.

So you've got this competition, this competition going for people to buy goods, to sell goods, to stay, to buy food, basically economics.

- [David] When the Columbus Avenue Bridge opened, Ohio City business owners were furious and boycotted the bridge and Cleveland Mayor John Willie responded.

- So they decided to take down the floating bridge, which, of course, would mean no traffic going through Ohio City, which upset the people of Ohio City.

And they said, oh no.

- The mayor's reason for halting operations may have had less to do with being snubbed by his west side neighbors and more to do with lining his pockets.

Mayor Willie owned land along the site of the new bridge.

- They are the ones that bought up all of the land in what is now the Columbus Peninsula, that east bank of the Flats area.

They purchased that land.

They were speculators and looked to develop it.

You were elected mayor sometimes because of your wealth, because of who you were, that you owned the land and that got your name in front of people.

That's why you became mayor.

So yeah, that's definitely something that, you know, you look at it and you kind of shake your head.

But, you know, that happens more frequently than we might like to imagine.

- [David] In 1836, the issue turned to violent When a group of Ohio City residents gathered at the Columbus Street Bridge to tear it down.

- The Ohio City people marched down and tried to take pickaxes and shovels and whatever they had and destroy their end of the Columbus Street Bridge, which is a lot more sturdy than the floating bridge.

Eventually they tried to dynamite it and to blow it up.

- Cleveland Mayor John Willie and a group of armed militiamen clashed with the residents of Ohio City until the Sheriffs Department intervened.

- There were guns drawn.

The sheriff was injured.

Some reports say he was conked on the head.

Some people said that he was just pushed down in the melee and it's kind of funny of going to war over a bridge but people could have been really, really hurt.

- [David] Eventually the courts ruled that the Center Street and Columbus Avenue overpasses had the right to operate, but nothing could bridge the divide between east and west sides that still lingers today.

- This could be at the heart of it.

And, of course, we are a city of bridges, and eventually we had many, many more bridges, but I think this, folk memory lasts a long time.

(patriotic fife and drum music) - In 1850, the City of Cleveland annexed Ohio City.

For four decades, (lively music) underwater photographer Stephen Frink has been taking photos of the captivating creatures that live under the sea.

Take a look.

- I can't tell you how many queen angelfish I've photographed over the years, but this is the one that of all of them resonates more.

And I think it is because the fish has personality.

My name is Stephen Frink.

I'm an underwater photographer from Key Largo, Florida.

I travel the world for underwater photography but this is my hometown.

I'm also the publisher of "Alert Diver" magazine.

The fish was just turning into me and I had a hundred millimeter macro lens on it.

And, you know, it was able to lock into focus and the eye contact is really good too.

It's not like I had to chase this animal.

I was there, he came to me, we had a moment, and he was gone.

For marine life photography, I think proximity is one of the most important things.

And I think you have to be able to project a benign presence.

You have to approach the animal in a fashion so they're not threatened.

So that means not moving too fast so that you don't push a big force field of water.

They have to believe in you.

And we also have to think a little bit about the behavior so that we know that a butterfly fish, for example, is probably gonna be looking for a little crevice to find little crustaceans and things of that nature.

If you know a little bit about the fish, you can predict where they may be and you can place yourself in that position.

There's an area where a fish may flee, the field of flight.

So I set everything before I enter the field of flight.

So I'll set the aperture, the shutter speed.

I'll think in my mind's eye, how is this photo meant to look?

Where should my strobes be?

So I try to do all of those things hypothetically from about six feet away so I'm not inside that field of flight.

People I think maybe think that I dive all the time.

I don't.

But I dive a lot in chunks of time.

I'll get on an airplane and I'll go somewhere and I'll dive real heavy for two weeks.

I typically pick destinations by what it's particularly good for.

For example, if I wanna shoot great white sharks, I would either go to Guadalupe in Mexico or South Australia.

I think I spent many years looking at the photography of other people and looking at the composition and think, how did they do that?

So long as you have, I think, a good camera and good lights because color doesn't really exist underwater in the absence of artificial light.

Once you have the tools, you can get a serviceable photograph.

I think what transcends a serviceable photograph into art is composition and the eye of the artist.

I teach underwater photo seminars and that's probably the hardest thing.

And what about color?

Awareness that we try to bring to my students at the outset that no photograph is worth damaging the marine environment.

It should be no surprise to anybody that the oceans of the world are in trouble.

There are just so many things that are affecting the ocean that a visual communicator can bring to editorial awareness.

One of the things that I think is really brilliant about the whole Florida Keys, particularly the Upper Keys, when you have a marine protected area, the fish trust the divers.

They know that we're not here to spear them.

We're not here to pull them kicking and screaming out of the water to a dinner plate.

(gentle music) I think in terms of the future of underwater photography, I think we're kind of at a threshold.

So what's gonna happen to make underwater photography better?

For as heavy and bulky as these housings are, if it got smaller, that would be good.

I think it's become far more democratic.

One of the reasons that when I opened my studio here I did well renting cameras was because nobody had them.

In the morning, I would rent my camera and if nobody rented it I'd go diving.

So that's kinda how I started here.

It's exciting.

If it were not for underwater photography, I wouldn't be a diver today because I'd be bored.

But I'm never, ever bored diving because even though it's a, oh I don't know, let's say a French angel and I've shot 12,000 French angelfish in my life, this one's different.

But there's still really, really inspiring things.

(lively jazz music) - [David] On the next "Applause", the latest from Playhouse Square about the return of the Key Bank Broadway Series and the announcement of this year's winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Plus we take a look at the connection between the Jewish community and Key West, Florida.

(upbeat guitar music) - I'm fascinated by untold histories and this book is full of that.

(lively jazz music) - [David] All this and more on the next round of "Applause".

(lively Cuban music) The installation, Cuban Caricature and Culture, the Art of Massaguer, features the modernist works of artist and publisher Conrado Walter Massaguer.

We travel to Miami, Florida, for a look at the exhibit.

- My name is Francis Luca and I'm the Chief Librarian here at the Wolfsonian Florida International University.

I'm the curator of this installation that's looking at Conrado Walter Massaguer a Cuban publisher, art director, illustrator, and caricaturist.

(lively Cuban music) He was born in Cuba in 1889.

He actually left and fled with his family when the Spaniards invaded during one of the independence Wars.

And so he grew up kind of biculturally and then multiculturally.

And so I think for that reason, he was influenced not only by the artwork in Cuba, but what was happening in the modernist movement all around the world.

(singing in Spanish) He actually introduced the modernist aesthetic to Cuba with a lot of art deco designed covers for his magazines.

"Social" was one of his most important magazines and that one aimed at an elite audience.

So this was designed to get the who's who of Cuba interested in modernism.

(singing in Spanish) (jazzy Cuban music) He had an entire section in "Social" magazine called Massa Girls, which is a play on his name, sounds like Massaguer, Massa Girl.

And what he was doing with that was showcasing this new woman that had suddenly appeared first on the American scene and then he helped import into Cuba.

He loved beautiful young women.

He was a little bit of a (speaking in Spanish) in that way but he wasn't so thrilled about their being so outspoken and liberated.

That, I think, was a little bit threatening to him as well.

So you sort of see that little bit of ambivalence in these kinds of portraits.

(upbeat Cuban music) He was also very famous for his caricatures.

In fact, that's how he's mostly known today.

And he did over the span of a lifetime, tens of thousands of caricatures.

And he did them in a very modernist style.

He said, "The best caricatures are done on the sly with a furtive hand where you're just sketching them and they don't even know that you're sketching them."

Some of his caricatures got him in a little bit of trouble.

He was not shy of expressing his disdain for certain Cuban presidents.

You look at Machado sitting in the chair, not so handsome.

And then you look at the portrait that's being done.

And it's, oh, he's young and handsome?

It's a completely different individual.

Massaguer spent a lot of time working for the tourism industry in Cuba which began in 1919.

(light Cuban music) Since this exhibit focuses exclusively on the work of Conrado Massaguer, I wanted to sort of show him in the context of some of the other contemporary caricaturists from Latin America.

And so it's called Caricaturas.

(lively Cuban music) Once Castro's revolutionaries seized power, Massaguer continued to live in Cuba though in relative obscurity until his death in 1965.

Here is someone who was the cultural ambassador for all of these visitors, especially from the United States, and all of a sudden, there are no visitors from the United States after 1959.

He ends up working in the Cuban National Archives just spending out his remaining days there.

To me, the most important thing about this exhibition is the fact that we can showcase this artist who was well-known, well-renowned in his period but has sort of been eclipsed because of more than 50 years of strained relations between Cuba and the United States.

And his artwork is reflective of this earlier period, this period of warm relations and cordial relations.

- [David] Nearly a century after the artworks of Conrado Massaguer appeared in Cuba, the works of nine leading Cuban-born artists living in the United States debuted at the exhibit, The Miami Generation.

Some 30 years after that original show, the NSU Art Museum, part of Nova Southeastern University, picked up where the exhibit left off by featuring works created by the nine original artists.

(gentle Spanish guitar music) after the original exhibit held in 1983.

- It seems like when people think of Cuba and Cuban art, they always think that they are going to be looking at still lives of mangoes and paintings of Carmen Miranda who was not even Cuban.

So when they come here, they will see that the Cubans are not afraid to face and portray themes that are mature, that are sophisticated, and that require a little thinking.

The title of the exhibition is The Miami Generation Revisited.

The exhibition was first mounted with the original nine people back in 1983.

And then, of course, since then the original curator passed away and three of the artists also died of AIDS.

- It's very sobering to walk about this exhibition and see so many missing.

And at the same time, I smile when I see some of the work because these are works that I had seen before.

So it's very special that at least we're showing together in this particular occasion 31 years after the original exhibition.

- The goal was to bring together a group of nine artists who were of a Cuban origins.

They were all born in Cuba and most of them came to the United States when they were teenagers.

What they share in common was that they developed as artists in the United States being brought up in exile.

- Supposedly we were, you know, handpicked we, like the best in the city at that time for Cuban painters.

And we traveled to Washington, to Philadelphia, to Puerto Rico.

So it was a very nice experience.

- Then it broke new ground because we have never had an exhibition of a group of Cuban Americans.

So like I said, it was something that it was coming and in a way overdue like this exhibition is.

- So I always find (lively piano music) my personal history permeating the work I do.

The genesis of this piece and the series titled "Wind Paintings" was the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl that was in April, 1986.

And I was in Paris at the time working.

All of a sudden there's this radioactive cloud coming in, carrying this radioactive particles.

The idea of the wind and the Chernobyl accident totally changed my work from mostly abstract aerial views of landscapes to a more referential, almost ecological type of consciousness.

The wind, all of a sudden and landscape in general has been romanticized by many artists since the beginning.

And how can we go from here when man does something to nature and then nature turns against itself?

The relationship in nature, as we know today, and what as an artist, what do I do about this?

How can I, I cannot romanticize it anymore.

(lively Cuban music) - I was born and raised in a house that had views to the ocean, two blocks away, from three different streets.

So that line with the sea of the Caribbean it was a constant in my youth growing up.

I've had several periods in my career.

And this was architectural scenarios that evoked, you know, the architecture of Cuba and the Caribbean.

Connected to Cuba through the colors and through some of the architectural elements, but not exactly Cuban.

I did "The Flooding" using the symbolism of when you're covered with water, it represents a big tragedy, but it also represents rebirth and purification, what we have gone through.

- We have the work (gentle guitar music) of Emilio Falero.

What he liked to do was to bring together works of art by different artists from different generations and establish a dialogue between the past and the present.

- 'Cause there's a big enthusiasm for anything done in Cuba but they ignore, once the artist leaves Cuba, he's no longer important.

So I keep telling look and see what's done outside Cuba.

You know, because I mean, Cuba art can can be done outside Cuba too.

- [Jorge] You can look at it as a family reunion.

- It was an opportunity to meet them all again and to see the development.

Has been 30 years so the work in all of us has evolved and changed.

So it was very nice to, a very nice experience.

I would say, even better than the first one.

- Each of them somehow whistles a different tune.

There's very little repetition here.

They are all originals.

And what they do is that they bring together aspects from North American culture and Cuban culture.

- But something was brewing at the time.

And I'm happy to have been part of it and still are.

This is home.

I'm a Miami boy.

(light upbeat music) - [David] Connor Fogal is a Nevada-based artist with cerebral palsy but you'd never know it looking at his work.

His skill and patience is clear in everything from his graphic design, photography, to his painting and even puzzles for children.

- [Narrator] From painting to graphic design to photography, Connor Fogal is an emerging artist who finds creative ways to express himself.

With a paintbrush attached to a customized headset, he brings his paintings to life.

The headset was originally meant as a head pointer for him to use on the computer when he was in the fourth grade.

And over the years, his family began experimenting by taping pencils and other tools to the headset so he could draw and eventually adapted it into what it is now, a means for him to bring his brushstrokes onto canvas.

Connor's cerebral palsy makes it difficult for him to speak.

However, he feels that his art is how he communicates best with people and that he is able to express himself through each stroke of his brush.

One of his passions is to use his art to inform others that disabled people are just like anyone else and are capable of doing what they love.

He uses his computer to create some of the background designs of his paintings and do other graphic design.

A special device called the Sip 'n' Puff substitutes the controls of the mouse and the keyboard.

He inhales through a tube connected to his mouth via headset to perform a left click of the mouse and a puff into the tube performs a right click.

A camera on his computer tracks the center of his headset and this allows him to control the pointer on the screen.

Spencer Allen is Connor's direct care provider and helps guide Connor through his development as an artist.

- Lately, Connor has been interested in painting portraits and he's working on a series of painting portraits of his family.

Since we've been learning that design work in the computer program, he's begun incorporating the computer design into his paintings and pre-planning his paintings with backgrounds and making them more multi-dimensional - [Narrator] To further demonstrate that people with disabilities can be self-sustaining, he sells his artwork and produces an annual calendar to raise money to help support himself and buy adaptive equipment.

He is also partnering with Spencer Allen, his direct care provider, to grow Creative Potential, a company comprised of artists with disabilities who create learning-based wooden toys and puzzles for children.

- It's a great feeling to have and knowing that I can help kids learn.

- [Narrator] Connor's parents always taught him that he can do anything that anybody else can just maybe a little differently.

And this remarkable artist shows us that in addition to his work, nothing in life can stop you with the right mindset.

(gentle piano music) - [David] Well, that wraps it up for today's show.

You'll find more stories online at arts.ideastream.org.

Thanks for watching.

I'm ideastream's David C. Barnett.

Hope to catch you next week for another round of "Applause".

(lively jazzy piano music) (dynamic electronic music) (lively classical music) - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on WVIZ/PBS is made possible by grants from the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud Family Trust, the Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation, and by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.